Home / Indicators / QQE
Oscillator indicator

QQE: what it's actually best at

QQE is a channel / envelope rule in our oscillator family — it measures how far price has travelled from a moving reference and acts at the extremes. We publish where it holds up and where it fails, with the out-of-sample numbers; the exact settings we tested stay in the engine.

Tested and published by IndicatorEdge · backtest grid generated 2026-06-25 · base rates recomputed 2026-07-31 · how we test

18 of 902
assets where it was the #1 edge
on the other 884, a different indicator did better
0.37
average Sharpe across all tests
median across all 382 indicators is 0.25 — this one ranks above 363 of them
Oscillator
indicator family
Base rate

How often QQE beat buy-and-hold

444 of 1,835 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 24.2%. On the other 1,391 it did not. That is above the 20.1% rate across all 382 indicators we test (one pooled rate over all 660,005 tests we have run, not a mean of the per-indicator rates).

Each test is one asset on one timeframe: 1,835 of them, drawn from 902 assets across up to 4 timeframes. Not every asset has usable history on every timeframe, so that total is the grid we could actually run — it is not 902 × 4, and we do not pad it with tests we did not do. "Beat" means a higher return than holding that same asset over that same window. Measured out-of-sample — on data the setup was not chosen on.

Picking the single best timeframe for each asset after the fact raises it to 41.1% (371/902 assets). That number is the one worth distrusting: choosing the timeframe once you already know the answer is how backtests flatter themselves. Every indicator, ranked by this number

What's on this page — and what isn't

We publish the verdict: the indicator's name, the assets and timeframes it holds up on, and the honest numbers for both its wins and its failures. We do not publish the recipe — the settings, lengths and thresholds we tested. That is the part worth paying for, and republishing it would just add one more free indicator to a market that already has thousands. Everything you need to judge whether QQE is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.

Best fits

Assets where QQE won

Entries marked artifact are incoherent rather than merely risky — an annualised return above 200% (illiquidity compounding on a short history), or a drawdown at total loss, where no positive return is possible afterwards. They are shown rather than quietly dropped, because deleting your own bad rows is how the numbers on every other site got so good.

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